"Howard, I'm a parasite. I've been a parasite all my life. You designed my best projects at Stanton. You designed the first house I ever built. You designed the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. I have fed on you and on all the men like you who lived before we were born. the men who designed the Parthenon, the Gothic cathedrals, the first skyscrapers. If they hadn't existed, I wouldn't have known how to put stone on stone. I have taken that which was not mine and given nothing in return. I had nothing t give. This is not an act, Howard, and I'm very conscious of hat I'm saying. And I came here to ask you to save me again. If you wish to throw me out do it now...Howard...I brought something to show you...I haven't shown it to anyone. Not to mother or Ellsworth Toohey... I just want you to tell me if there's any..." he handed to Roark sixe of his canvases. Roark looked at them, one after another. He took a longer time than he needed. When he could trust himself to lift his eyes, he shook his head in silent answer to the word Keating had not pronounced. "It's too late PEter," he said gently. he had never felt this before-not when Henry Cameron collapsed in the office at his feet, not when he saw Steven Mallory sobbing on a bed before him. Thos moments had been clean. But this was pity-this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling-his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgement upon a man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect. This is pity, he thought, and then he lefted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called virtue."
-Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"
